Awkwardness and Bawdy Talk: 7 Tales of Presidential Courtship

You may be surprised to learn that not every politician is equipped with romantic game. Here are the stories of a few presidents who had a little difficulty garnering the affections of the first lady – or at least had a few awkward moments during the courtship. Learn from their fumbles, and be grateful that your own aren’t subject to public scrutiny.

1. John Adams’ Ill-Timed Inoculation

If you’re seriously pursuing a woman, try not to get quarantined midway through courtship. That’s exactly what happened to John Adams soon after he began dating Abigail. Because Adams spent a significant amount of time in Boston, where the smallpox epidemic was raging, he opted to get vaccinated. The procedure required a six-week quarantine, during which all physical contact was forbidden.

While Abigail was delighted to receive notes from her sweetheart during his time away, she was so fearful of catching smallpox that she requested that John thoroughly “smoke” the letters before sending them. She wrote, “I hope you smoke your letters well, before you deliver them. Mamma is so fearful lest I should catch the distemper, that she hardly ever thinks the letters are sufficiently purified.” Upon their arrival, Abigail would ask her slave to smoke them one more time and hovered over him while he did. Though the notes themselves were quite heartfelt, the smoky smell definitely made them a tad less romantic.

2. Woodrow Wilson and the Embarrassing Typo

Woodrow Wilson didn’t actually have a problem enticing his wife-to-be Edith Galt to go out with him; the awkwardness came after they’d already been dating. The two began seeing each other in 1915, a year after Wilson’s first wife, Ellen, had passed away. Fearing that critics would condemn him for moving on too quickly, 59-year-old Wilson kept the relationship on the down-low. But one day, the Washington Post published a news blurb exposing the couple’s night out on the town. The article was supposed to read, “Rather than pay attention to the play, the president spent the evening entertaining Mrs. Galt.” But an unfortunate typo stated, “... the president spent the evening entering Mrs. Galt.”

3. Richard Nixon’s Strange Chauffeur Service

Nixon was never exactly a ladies man. When he proposed to his future wife Pat on their first date, she thought he was nuts. But that didn’t deter him. Instead, Nixon offered to be her driver on her dates with other men. He also inundated her with mushy love letters, referring to himself in the third person and to Pat as “thee.” One line read, “When the wind blows and the rains fall and the sun shines through the clouds (as it is now) he still resolves. . . that nothing so fine ever happened to him or anyone else as falling in love with Thee -- my dearest heart.”

Pat’s replies were a little more succinct. She wrote back, “In case I don't see you before, why don't you come early Wednesday and I'll see if I can burn a hamburger for you." But despite her apparent lack of interest, Pat eventually came around and let Nixon drive her on more dates - this time with himself.

4. Calvin Coolidge’s Lasting First Impression

Grace Donahue Goodhue first spotted the demure Calvin Coolidge through a boarding house window while she was watering flowers outside. At that moment, he happened to be shaving in front of a mirror wearing nothing but long underwear and a derby hat - which he claimed was to keep the hair out of his eyes. Grace burst out laughing, causing Coolidge to turn and see her glancing up at him from the street below. Not only did the long johns and shaving cream not catch on – the notoriously reserved president also had to endure decades of taunting from his wife... and everyone else who heard the tale of their initial encounter.

5. Harry Truman’s Unrelenting Love Letters

Truman was acutely aware of his lack of romantic game, admitting, “I was always afraid of girls my age and older.” But when he met Bess Wallace at Sunday school, it was love at first sight. However, while he only had eyes for her, it took almost 30 years before she reciprocated his passion. As adults, Truman began inundating her with over-the-top love letters. In one 1911 note, he opened with remarks about the weather, seamlessly transitioning into a marriage proposal. “Water and potatoes will soon be as much of a luxury as pineapples and diamonds," he wrote. "Speaking of diamonds, would you wear a solitaire one on your left hand should I get it?”

Bess said no. But Truman kept at it, proclaiming his unwavering dedication. In one letter, he declared that if she ever accepted his offer – “I'd make love to you so hard you'd either have to say yes or knock me on the head” – but then promptly apologized for his forwardness. But perhaps that kind of talk was convincing. In 1913, two and a half years after Truman’s original proposal, Bess said her feelings had changed. In 1919, the two finally tied the knot, and Harry moved in with Bess and her mother. Yup, Truman was a smooth operator right up until the very end.

6. Grover Cleveland Robs the Cradle

The only president to serve two non-consecutive terms was also the only president married in a White House ceremony. Grover Cleveland was 49 and a little more than a year into his first term when he married 21-year-old Frances Folsom. Cleveland had known his bride her whole life. Her father was a close friend of the future president, and Cleveland bought the infant Frances a baby carriage as a gift. Growing up she called him "Uncle Cleve." When her father died leaving no will, the court appointed Cleveland to administer the estate.

The wedding was a simple affair, attended by close friends, family, and cabinet members and their wives. But the occasion was far from quiet—John Philip Sousa led the Marine Band. After the ceremony, "the ladies kissed the bride to their hearts content," The New York Times reported, "but the gentlemen followed the example of the groom and refrained." There was a 20-pound salmon to sup on and a 25-pound wedding cake.

7. Barack Obama’s Workplace Romance

Getty Images

When Michelle Robinson was assigned to be Barack Obama’s supervisor while he worked as a summer associate at a Chicago law firm, she took one look at his file and said, “This guy’s gotta be kind of weird.” For some reason, Michelle thought his exotic name and prestigious pedigree (Harvard Law School, which she also attended) screamed “Steve Urkel” louder than “marriage material.” After meeting Barack, she admitted that he was cuter than she’d expected, but resolved to keep the relationship strictly professional, even after he asked her out multiple times. Finally, after a good bit of nagging on his part, she eventually acquiesced and agreed to hang out—as long as they didn’t call it a date. But after a day filled with art museums, jazz clubs, and Spike Lee, Michelle decided to give the whole romance in the workplace thing a try. In Barack’s case, persistence paid off.

Note: The Grover Cleveland section was written by David Holzel for a previous article on White House Weddings.

Photo Illustration by Lucy Quintanilla. Badge: Gift of Dr. Patricia Heaston; Tin: Gift from Dawn Simon Spears and Alvin Spears, Sr.; Sign, Photograph of Walker Agents: Gift of A’Lelia Bundles / Madam Walker Family Archives. All from the Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Background/photo border, iStock

Photo Illustration by Lucy Quintanilla. Badge: Gift of Dr. Patricia Heaston; Tin: Gift from Dawn Simon Spears and Alvin Spears, Sr.; Sign, Photograph of Walker Agents: Gift of A’Lelia Bundles / Madam Walker Family Archives. All from the Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Background/photo border, iStock

Like many fortunes, Madam C.J. Walker’s started with a dream. As she later explained to a newspaper reporter, Walker was earning barely a dollar a day as a washerwoman when she had a dream about a man who told her how to create a hair-growing tonic. When she awoke, Walker sent away for the ingredients, investing $1.25 in what she eventually dubbed “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower.” The venture would propel her to become one of America’s first black female entrepreneurs—and reportedly the first self-made female millionaire in the nation.

Born Sarah Breedlove on December 23, 1867 to freed slaves on a plantation in Delta, Louisiana, the woman who would become known as Madam C.J. Walker was orphaned by age 7 and married by 14. The couple had one child, Lelia (later known as A’Lelia), but six years into the marriage, Walker’s husband died, by some accounts in a race riot. Walker then worked washing clothes while dreaming of building a better life for her daughter. “As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds,” she later told The New York Times, “I said to myself: ‘What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?’”

By 1903, Walker had relocated to St. Louis and started to work for an African-American hair care company before then moving to Denver, where she had heard that the dry air exacerbated hair and scalp issues. At the time, such complaints were widespread among African-Americans, in part due to a lack of black-focused products and access to indoor plumbing. By the early 1900s, Walker herself had lost much of her hair.

Then came her dream. “[I] put it on my scalp,” she later said of the tonic, “and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.”

In 1905, Walker began selling her solution door-to-door and at church events. She took the product on tour, traveling throughout the South and Northeast and recruiting other door-to-door saleswomen. A year later, she married Charles Joseph Walker and established the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, and in 1908 founded Lelia College in Pittsburgh, a beauty parlor and school for training Madam Walker brand ambassadors. Two years later, she relocated her business headquarters to Indianapolis—then a commercial hub—where she and a mostly female cadre of top executives produced Wonderful Hair Grower on an industrial scale.

A’Lelia, however, was not content with the Midwestern milieu. In 1913 she convinced her mother to open an office in New York and decamped to Manhattan, acquiring a stately Harlem townhouse designed by Vertner Tandy, the first registered black architect in the state. The home, later nicknamed the Dark Tower after poet Countee Cullen’s “From the Dark Tower,” included a Lelia College outpost on the first floor and living and entertaining spaces on the top three. A’Lelia frequently threw lavish parties there, attended by Harlem Renaissance luminaries such as Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes.

Walker followed A’Lelia north, where she purchased the adjacent townhouse. Soon, she was a cultural mover and shaker in her own right, joining the NAACP’s New York chapter and helping to orchestrate the Silent Protest Parade in 1917, when roughly 10,000 African-Americans marched down Fifth Avenue as a demonstration against the East St. Louis race riots earlier that year, in which dozens of African-Americans had been killed.

“She became politically active and very much an advocate of women’s economic independence,” Walker’s great-great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles, a journalist and biographer, tells Mental Floss. “She used her national platform to advocate for civil rights.”

The same year as the Silent Protest, Walker and a handful of Harlem leaders traveled to the White House to petition for anti-lynching legislation, and donated $5000 to the NAACP’s Anti-Lynching Fund—the largest single gift ever recorded by the fund. In 1916, she established the Madam C. J. Walker Benevolent Association, a program that encouraged Walker brand ambassadors to engage in charity work and hygiene education outreach.

As her empire grew, Walker continued to monumentalize her success. In 1916, she bought a four-acre parcel of land in Irvington, New York, and enlisted Tandy to design her a home to rival the nearby estates of Jay Gould and John D. Rockefeller. Her determination only swelled in the face of realtors who tried to charge her twice the price of the land to discourage her, and incredulous neighbors who reportedly mistook the hair care baroness for a maid when she arrived at the property in her Ford Model T.

Like her Manhattan residence, the mansion became a popular hang-out for the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Walker also used the home to give back. “She made a blanket invitation to the returning African American soldiers [from World War I] to please come visit the home,” Bundles says. It also served as a kind of early safe space for A’Lelia and her largely LGBTQ social network.

But almost as soon as the home was complete, Madam Walker’s health began to crumble. Though she was diagnosed with high blood pressure and kidney problems, Walker continued to work and roll out new products. “Like most entrepreneurs she couldn’t figure out how to slow down,” Bundles says. “She needed to rest, but she couldn’t really make herself.”

In the spring of 1919, while on a business trip to St. Louis to unveil five new formulas, Walker fell gravely ill and was shuttled back to Irvington in a private car. That May, she died of kidney failure at the age of 51.

Yet her influence would live on. At the time of her death, an estimated 40,000 black women had been trained as Walker saleswomen. In 1927 the Madame Walker Theatre Center opened in Indianapolis, housing offices, a manufacturing center, and a theatre. Her name on the building reflected her unprecedented imprint on black entrepreneurship.

The Madam C.J. Walker brand also survived. In fact, it’s recently been revitalized, after black-owned hair care company Sundial acquired it in 2016, debuting two dozen new formulas exclusively at Sephora last spring. “It’s very glam,” says Bundles, who serves as the line’s historical consultant. In a historic deal in November 2017, consumer goods conglomerate Unilever acquired Sundial’s $240 million portfolio, and as part of the agreement designated $50 million to empower businesses led by women of color.

Walker’s house, known as Villa Lewaro, has had a rockier afterlife, having been owned by the NAACP and then used as an assisted living center for decades. In 1993, stock broker and U.S. ambassador Harold Doley and his wife Helena purchased the property, committing to a years-long restoration process. They’ve recently secured a protective easement for the site, which prevents future buyers from altering the appearance of the home—a means of preserving the house’s history, and that of Madam Walker.

Walker’s legacy is also likely to gain a new round of admirers with the recently announced Octavia Spencer-fronted television show about her life, which is based on a biography by Bundles and is allegedly courting distribution by Netflix.

With her brand in full swing and her life story about to be immortalized on the small screen, it seems that even in death, Madam Walker’s dream lives on.

Long before he gained fame as a mathematician and scientist, Sir Isaac Newton was a young artist who lacked a proper canvas. Now, a 350-year-old sketch on a wall, discovered at Newton’s childhood home in England, is shedding new light on the budding genius and his early fascination with motion, according to Live Science.

While surveying Woolsthorpe Manor, the Lincolnshire home where Newton was born and conducted many of his most famous experiments, conservators discovered a tiny etching of a windmill next to a fireplace in the downstairs hall. It’s believed that Newton made the drawing as a boy, and may have been inspired by the building of a nearby mill.

A windmill sketch, believed to have been made by a young Sir Isaac Newton at his childhood home in Lincolnshire, England.

National Trust

Newton was born at Woolsthorpe Manor in 1642, and he returned for two years after a bubonic plague outbreak forced Cambridge University, where he was studying mechanical philosophy, to close temporarily in 1665. It was in this rural setting that Newton conducted his prism experiments with white light, worked on his theory of “fluxions,” or calculus, and famously watched an apple fall from a tree, a singular moment that’s said to have led to his theory of gravity.

Paper was a scarce commodity in 17th century England, so Newton often sketched and scrawled notes on the manor’s walls and ceilings. While removing old wallpaper in the 1920s and '30s, tenants discovered several sketches that may have been made by the scientist. But the windmill sketch remained undetected for centuries, until conservators used a light imaging technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to survey the manor’s walls.

A conservator uses light technology to survey the walls of Woolsthorpe Manor, the childhood home of Sir Isaac Newton.

National Trust

RTI uses various light conditions to highlight shapes and colors that aren’t immediately visible to the naked eye. “It’s amazing to be using light, which Newton understood better than anyone before him, to discover more about his time at Woolsthorpe,” conservator Chris Pickup said in a press release.

The windmill sketch suggests that young Newton “was fascinated by mechanical objects and the forces that made them work,” added Jim Grevatte, a program manager at Woolsthorpe Manor. “Paper was expensive, and the walls of the house would have been repainted regularly, so using them as a sketchpad as he explored the world around him would have made sense," he said.

The newly discovered graffiti might be one of many hidden sketches drawn by Newton, so conservators plan to use thermal imaging to detect miniscule variations in the thickness of wall plaster and paint. This technique could reveal even more mini-drawings.